Cooling from air conditioning saves lives—more than 5,000 a year in the US alone—but it also heats up the planet and taxes our electrical grids, scientists say. As the world warms, heat waves strike nearly every continent, and United Nations officials estimate that about half a million people die a year from heat, AC is needed and being used more than ever, per the AP. A study in Nature Health reported on Monday that air conditioning saved nearly 58,000 lives between 2010 and 2020 in the US. Air conditioning use is skyrocketing around the world, with electricity demand from cooling expected to triple, per the International Energy Agency and the UN Environment Programme.
It's also more of a problem than ever. Because most of the electricity for cooling comes from the burning of fossil fuels, the UN projects that the amount of heat-trapping gas spewed into the atmosphere from air conditioning use will rise from 4.5 billion tons to 7.2 billion tons in the next 25 years or so. That 7.2 billion tons is almost as much as the carbon pollution from the US and Europe now. "Everyone knows air conditioning works, but air conditioning from a climate change perspective is not an ideal," says Yale epidemiology professor Kai Chen, senior author on the new study. "It leads to more carbon emissions ... then it accelerates the climate warming problem."
Chen and his team went through 30 million US death records over an 11-year time span, used county-by-county calculations for levels when heat becomes dangerous, and figured out how many lives AC saved during extreme heat. The most lives saved were in Arizona, Florida, Texas, Louisiana, and southern parts of Nevada, Alabama, and Mississippi. Chen says the study concluded that the "essential role" of air conditioning saved, on average, 5,267 lives a year. But it also found that has to be balanced with "overuse." Many places use 75 degrees Fahrenheit as a reasonable limit for air conditioning, Chen notes.
It's also an issue of fairness, as many of the world's vulnerable populations don't have access to or can't afford AC, per both Chen and UN officials. Due to a global energy crunch triggered by the Iran war, eight countries—Bangladesh, Cambodia, Jordan, Malaysia, the Philippines, the Seychelles, Singapore, and Sri Lanka—have limited how cool AC can be in offices or even mandated a day a week for public offices to switch it off, per the IEA. The Global Cooling Pledge will meet in September in Singapore. More here.
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
